


Life in the NFL

by TheWrongKindOfPC



Category: Jessica Jones (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-08
Updated: 2020-04-08
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:28:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23549923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWrongKindOfPC/pseuds/TheWrongKindOfPC
Summary: “Welcome back to the team, canary in the coal mine.”An Erik Gelden character study.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13





	Life in the NFL

Jessica has apparently been back in town for a few months before she decides to call Erik up, but he doesn’t find that out until later.

“He keeps saying he didn’t do it,” Jessica says, jerking her head in the direction of the jerk tied to the chair. Erik is very aware of the amount that it can piss a person off, being tied to a chair un-recreationally, so he’s willing to cut the guy some slack, but chair-guy also spit at Erik when he walked in, and Erik’s head has been throbbing since he made it into the room -- this guy’s malevolence isn’t just painful, it’s a pain that _radiates_.

Still, “I’m a magic eight ball, not a polygraph,” Erik reminds her, but Jessica just rolls her eyes.

“I’m not asking you for admissible evidence, I’m asking for confirmation that I’m not on the wrong track before I turn him in. We’ve got the evidence to put him away, but if you can tell me he didn’t do it because a guy this good wouldn’t do something like that, then I’ll keep looking, because he might be telling the truth.”

“He, uh,” Erik can see, in principle, the logic of this strategy, but on the whole, it feels like a lot of pressure all of the sudden, and this guy, he does _hurt_ , he makes the veins behind Erik’s eyes feel to big for his head, but he’s not sending Erik scrambling for a Vicodin or a lobotomy, he’s a solidly middling-bad headache. “He’s definitely--” and as the guy looks up at him, the headache spikes. “He’s definitely no angel.” He’s not someone Erik would pick out as a sure thing for blackmail, but there’s also definitely something _there_.

Jessica smiles, and it’s a sardonic one, but the irony in her expression is comforting; too much sincerity from her and Erik thinks he’d start to worry. “Welcome back to the team, canary in the coal mine.”

...

Life at Alias these days involves seeing more of Bri than Erik has since he was eighteen years old. It’s surprisingly nice, and not just because she’s mellowed out on the throwing things at his head as a form of greeting.

Erik is sitting out on the fire escape with a cigarette, celebrating a job at least moderately well done, when Bri comes out and sits beside him. “Got a light?”

She’s not officially doing anything at Alias except flirting fitfully with Malcolm and Jessica’s secretary Gillian by turns. Erik personally is more a fan of the Gillian flirtation; the mess and headache around Malcolm has started to dissipate, but he’d rather no one who has ever had the kind of turmoil Erik used to sense around Malcolm get too close to his sister. Malcolm’s very changeability is enough to make him nervous. Free will is all very well, but most people, Erik has found, are fairly consistent, at least in the way that they make his head throb, if not in the specifics of the choices they make to get that way.

Unofficially, she’s been beating Jessica at blackjack to keep her humble and offering fairly prescient advice about which cases Alias should take on next -- not _surprisingly_ prescient, because Erik’s sister has always been smart, and has spent the better part of the past decade getting to know as many lowlifes as he has -- just knowing and helpful in a normal, thoughtful way.

He flips open the lighter and lights the spark himself, and holds the flame up to her cigarette, and he thinks, somewhere in the back of his mind, that even as recently as a year ago, she’d have walked away and not talked to him for months over the presumption of the action. While he’s sitting in his quiet almost-pleasure at their surprising third-act re-ability to know each other, Bri says “She’s not waiting for you, you know,” because even during the best parts of their childhood she has never shied away from kicking him when he was down if she thought he needed it.

Still, “Jessica? No shit she’s not waiting for me, she barely wants me near her cases.”

Bri exhales a mouthful of smoke and tells him, “Yeah, okay, but you’ve got the order wrong on those, though. She needs to trust you _more_ to let you near the cases than she does to let you near her body.”

“So why,” and Erik is still her brother, he still needs to needle her a little, so he leans over to ash vaguely over the toe of one of her boots, “If you’re so smart, why am I playing psychic on a case a week lately, but still persona non grata in the bedroom?”

Bri takes another long pull on her cigarette and then tilts over to rest her head against his shoulder and offers an airy giggle. “Maybe you’re just bad in bed.”

...

Another part of life at Alias these days is that Jessica still doesn’t drive, and no busses go out to the dock that brings supplies and its singular visitor to and from The Raft, so someone has to drive Jessica on her weekly pilgrimage to spend time three feet away from Trish behind reinforced, bulletproof glass. As one of the few people in the Alias orbit with a car, Erik ends up making the trip the most often.

This is fine, because it gives him the chance to try to get a read on her. Erik is fairly certain that the fact that she told him she was fleeing the country and then _didn’t_ , coupled with the fact that she only called him up again because she needed something from him means that there’s no going back to the pugnaciously flirty, teasing way they used to interact, but Erik has been figuring out new social paradigms for keeping people in his life since he deliberately destroyed his family of origin at the end of his childhood; he doesn’t let go easy when it feels important.

On the drive back, Jessica always seems tired, which only makes sense — Erik may mostly know Patsy Walker from vague celebrity knowledge osmosis, but he can’t imagine that she’s one of the very rare type who doesn’t mind getting betrayed by someone she trusted and put behind bars. Erik knows all too well that having good intentions only gets you so far when it comes to taking drastic actions that affect other people. Still, Jessica always walks in and then out again empty-handed. This makes sense in terms of the no-contact-order security system, but it also seems designed to ensure that this prisoner and her furiously devoted prisoner are doomed to continue to spend their visits sitting several feet apart and seething at each other.

In the aftermath of the third such visit, Erik asks her, “Do they let you send mail to prisoners on The Raft?” He doesn’t know much about it because he’s done his best to remain off the radar of anyone involved in the running of such a place for almost all of his life, the last few months aside.

“Nothing they don’t search,” Jessica answers testily, reaching a twitchy hand inside her jacket to where she keeps her lighter, like a reflex.

“I’m not suggesting you bake her a set of lock picks into a cake,” he tells her, “I’m saying why not send her, like, a deck of cards or something? She’s got to be bored as hell in there, and if you bring your own pack, or something, the next time you visit maybe you’ll both have something to do with your hands besides fantasizing about strangling each other.”

Jessica shoots him a _look_ , but she doesn’t answer. Erik shrugs. It was worth suggesting, he thinks, even if it was a long-shot.

…

The kid is a surprise, too.

He’s playing a game on a phone when Erik comes in to the office one day, and he’s not Jessica’s, that’s clear to everyone from the get-go, but the Alias office is still a strange place to find a child, and stranger, maybe, if he’s not the responsibility of anyone who works there. Erik can’t help but wonder who’s been letting their kid wander off up here.

He finds out fairly quickly, but meeting Oscar is somehow both the kindest and the most final nail on the coffin of whatever Erik and Jessica had going. Anyone who said no to Oscar without looking back is definitely not going to come running back to _Erik_ , no matter how fucked up Jessica likes to think that she is. Oscar is an _artist_ , and he’s _beautiful_ , and he’s got the kind of strong, active body that a sleazy barfly like Erik would never end up with, and when he walks in the room, Erik’s head is so quiet.

“C’mon,” Oscar says to his son, who has his feet up all over Jessica’s hated new couch. “Supper time, homework, let’s go.”

“I’m _doing_ homework,” the kid drawls, like a _liar_ , but his father is clearly wise to his tricks because he follows up by asking, “School-homework or Jessica-homework?”

“Gillian homework,” Gillian chimes in. “Which should definitely wait until after the school-homework, kiddo. Sorry, Oscar.”

Oscar smiles back easily, trusting, like he can feel the same thing Erik can; that Gillian is spiky and she’s defensive, but the choices she makes aren’t the kind that hurt people. Even if Oscar doesn’t have the same system of confirmation that Erik does, he seems like the kind of guy who would pride himself on trusting his instincts about people.

A few weeks later, Erik is actually the only one in the office when Oscar drops by in a getting-close-to-dinner-time visit to Alias. Erik is there in case a potential new client drops by — the guy is a little too persistent about pursuing their services, which could be a sign either of a nefarious motive, or of the seriousness of the case he wants them to look at. Jessica wants Erik to get a look at the guy before she thinks about filing a restraining order or, alternately, holding the guy up against a wall by his neck until he agrees to back off.

Erik’s hoping the shadow he sees through the distorted glass of the window in Alias’s front door is the guy, because he gets a welcome rush of _goodness_ from the flash of movement that’s reaching for the door handle. He supposes he shouldn’t be surprised to find that it’s Oscar instead.

Oscar shakes his head ruefully. “Is Jessica Jones out teaching my kid to commit credit card fraud?”

“Pretty sure your kid is the one running the show,” Erik tells him. “Last I heard, they were heading up to the roof to test out an egg-drop idea for his science class.” It was cute as _shit_ , actually, and Erik is fairly sure Jessica is just a few heartbeats away from being dragged into a fourth grade classroom as a surly, famous piece of politically controversial show-and-tell.

Oscar smiles indulgently and says, “Guess I’d better head up there,” and Erik’s not even a garden-variety good guy, never mind a Good Guy, he’s _not_ , but Jessica and the way she’s wrapped around this kid’s finger, and Oscar and the way he feels to Erik — like someone who doesn’t hurt people, no matter what side of the law he’s on — it all feels a little bit like the puzzle pieces that could make a family. Erik simultaneously wants to needle in a way that could wreck it, and to reassure. He’s not sure which is going to come out when he opens his mouth.

“There’s nothing there, between me and Jessica.”

Oscar’s smile looks almost ironic. “Not sure you’d be manning the desk like that, if that were true.”

That’s — fair enough, actually. Still, “Okay, but damned if I know what it is.”

“That sounds familiar,” Oscar says, leaning up against the doorway like he’s auditioning for a cologne ad, and Erik doesn’t know how to clarify to what he actually meant to begin with, or if he even wants to anymore.

From down the hall, they both hear the chime of the elevator, and turn in time to see the kid charging out into the hallway and toward them, yelling, “I did it! I made my egg drop so strong even Jessica couldn’t break it!” and the moment is gone.

…

The third time Jessica and Trish spend Jessica’s visit playing chess, Jessica wins. She doesn’t tell Erik this, but he knows it anyway from the languid way she’s leaning up against the car as he saunters up from the coffee shop where he’s been waiting out her visit, and the tiny smile on her face as she slides into the passenger’s seat. She doesn’t even object when Erik turns on the radio as he slides into the stream of traffic and points them back in the direction of Alias.


End file.
